Leicester bangs
Are they Madchester tribute band charlatans, an even more half-baked Kula Shaker, or swaggering rock monsters from Leicester? The jury is still out in the case of The People vs Kasabian.
Craig Fitzsimons, 14 Sep 2006
Kasabian would like it to be publicly known that they do not now, never have, and never will sound remotely like the Happy Mondays. Or the Stone Roses. Any resemblances are purely coincidental, and the press-gang who’ve largely dissed them as a stadium-rock version of tribute-band The Madchester Experience can fuck right off.
The criticism has clearly stung, though. Even New Order’s Peter Hook (a renowned gentleman) joined in the kicking last year, observing, “Kasabian are so fucking Stone Roses it’s fucking obscene. For someone to be that Stone Roses, you think ‘Oh, come on, fucking pack it in’. The Clone Roses don’t sound so much like the Stone Roses as Kasabian do.”
For their part, frontman Tom Meighan and multi-instrumentalist whiz Serge Pizzorno are bewildered that people have even drawn the connection. As Meighan protests: “We’ve never sounded anything like the Stone Roses, or the Happy Mondays. OK, I accept it’s got a few beats but it’s fuckin’ keyboard music – ‘I.D.’ or ‘Club Foot’ sound nothing like any of those people. I just don’t get it. We’re not that kind of band; we like to mix it up. We try to vary it. You’ve got a tune like ‘British Legion’ on the same album as ‘Stuntman’, there’s a huge mix.”
It transpires that Meighan and Pizzorno have recently been bitten by, of all things, the Delta blues bug.
“We listen to quite a lot of blues, all sorts of different stuff,” Meighan testifies. “I’ve just stuck some Muddy Waters on the iPod. All that shack blues is amazing, just three or four chords and he seems to make it up on the spot. That stuff makes you feel fucking great, gives you such an attitude and makes you feel good about yourself. Even the way you walk to the fuckin’ fridge is different when you’ve got blues playing. And we want Kasabian to have that effect on people. There’s a billion influences going on, but you can always tell it’s Kasabian, we’ve a very distinctive sound. If people think we sound like the Stone Roses, fair enough, fuck them anyway. I’d just ask people to press ‘play’ and make their own minds up.”
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