Indie rock legends will perform huge hits including Ruby and I Predict A Riot
When indie rock royalty the Kaiser Chiefs play in front of thousands of adoring fans at Newmarket Nights this summer, they know that a good time will be had by all.
There was a glorious stretch of the 2000s when British indie bands seemed to arrive in packs – all sharp haircuts, skinny ties, and choruses engineered to detonate inside sweaty student unions. But among them, the Kaiser Chiefs had something extra: They sounded like ordinary people discovering, to their delight, that they could become massive.
With an arsenal of smash hit pop-rock anthems including I Predict a Riot, Everyday I Love You Less and Less, Ruby and Oh My God, the Kaisers remain a much-loved institution.
Their August 22 Newmarket Nights show at Newmarket Racecourses promises to be another memorable moment in their stellar career, but there have also been times when such occasions looked off the cards and the band members asked themselves “should we carry on?”
“We’ve played twice before, I think, and both times there were big crowds,” said the band’s bass player, Simon Rix, as he looked ahead to the show. “We didn’t really know what to expect, to be perfectly honest.
“When we first started doing the racecourse thing at Newmarket, York and a couple of others, we thought it was going to be a 1,000 people in a tent sort of vibe. Then we turned up and there were 25-30,000 people there and it was like a festival show. We obviously love doing that so we love coming back.”
Fronted by the charismatic Ricky Wilson, the Kaisers have a reputation for delivering high-energy shows loved by audiences all over the world. They burst onto the scene in the mid-noughties, their debut album becoming 2005’s fourth biggest-selling record in the UK and spawning four massive hit singles. But the band had not suddenly emerged out of nowhere – their roots go back to when Nick Hodgson, Nick ‘Peanut’ Baines and Rix met at school.
They formed the band Runston Parva, later shortened to Parva, but were dropped by their record label without an album being released.
“I was 26-27 when we started doing well,” said Rix. “We were considered to be an overnight success, come from nowhere. And for the Kaiser Chiefs it was pretty quick – about 18 months or something from starting the band to when the album came out and it was number three when it first came out.
“Then that year, 2005, was absolutely mental – but we’d done a lot of things through school and university. People talk about it being an apprenticeship, learning how to be in a band, learning how to write songs, learning how to play live – so when the opportunities landed for the Kaisers, we were ready.
“We had great songs. We had I Predict a Riot, Oh My God and Every Day I Love You Less and Less and we’d be turned by every single record label. We were chomping at the bit. But there was a guy called Preston who was the front man of the Ordinary Boys, people might remember them, they might not.
“We did a lot of touring with those guys and they really loved the band. Basically Preston nagged his record label every day to sign us until they signed us. We were a bit older – when the Arctic Monkeys signed, they were 17-18. So maybe they were looking for more bands like that?
“One of the good things about the music industry these days is that the age thing seems to have disappeared a bit. But we got told we were too old a lot of times and all that stuff – there was a lot of disappointment. Then, in 2005, it was starting to get wearing after all those years of failure and disappointment, and trying hard.
“So, after we signed, we were trying to enjoy every minute. We did loads of gigs, every gig was bigger, we got lots of awards, we were in the newspapers and on the radio. It was the best time of my life but, what I say to people is that it was such a mad time – the best thing that had happened to me was happening every day.
“You’d get a piece of news that you were going to do the NME Tour or you were going to support U2, the album’s No 3, then eventually No 2, you’re playing at Glastonbury, you’re headlining this. Every day there was some news. You were either doing something or there was news that you were going to do something. That was ace.
“We went to America, all over Europe, Japan, Australia. It was great but so crazy, when I look back at it with all the travel and all that stuff, and we were kind of wiped out. You see pictures of us and we look absolutely knackered. Some of the stuff I don’t remember because it did become a bit of a blur.
“Peanut, our keyboard player, can sleep anywhere – on a plane, in the dressing room, in a corner, wherever. And there’s a picture of us at the NME Awards in 2005. We’d just come back from America and the other four of us look absolutely beaten up – but Peanut looks fine. He looks normal.”
However, there was a time when the band members thought it may never happen.
“When we were in the old band, Parva, we were in healthy competition with other bands around on the music scene in and around Leeds,” said Rix. “Then there was a point when we got dropped by the record company as Parva but we continued – we’d made a record and tried to get someone else to buy the record but no one was really biting. It seemed like it was winding down – we’d had our chance and missed it or wherever.
“So we did a gig and decided that was the last gig for this band. The next day, for whatever reason, we had a rehearsal and the conversation was ‘do we want to continue?’ Everybody was really enthusiastic to be a band and we decided we were still going to try as hard as we could to be as successful as possible.
“But if the highest we’re going to get is playing to 200 people in Leeds or 100 people in London and selling a few CDs, then we still want to be in a band because we love making music and we love getting in the van and going to do a gig.
“I think because we were doing it for ourselves a bit more, we wrote some songs that we really loved – those songs were Modern Way, Oh My God, Born to be a Dancer, stuff like that. Pretty quickly we thought ‘these are loads better than our old songs’ and very quickly the ambitions went straight up again.”
And that wasn’t the only occasion that the band questioned whether they should continue. It happened again when drummer Nick Hodgson, a key songwriter for some of their biggest hits, quit. He was replaced by Vijay Mistry and the Kaiser Chiefs have continued to thrive – the first album without him, Education, Education, Education & War, went to number one – and indeed all eight of their studio albums have reached the top ten.
But when Hodgson left, difficult conversations followed.
“There’s been two spots in the band when we’ve had that conversation and the other one was when Nick left,” said Rix. “Both times we’ve had it, it’s led to really good periods of creativity and enthusiasm for the band. I’ve been in the band, in some description, now for nearly 30 years with some of these people.
“Sometimes the enthusiasm is high, sometimes it’s less high – but those moments where you commit and go ‘this is what we want’ and everyone is on board, they’re the best for the Kaisers.
“So when Nick left there was a bit of a conversation about do we want to continue? And everyone was ‘yeah, yeah, let’s keep doing it’. We knew Vijay from other bands he was in before around Leeds so he seemed like an obvious choice if he was up for doing it.
“But also writing songs and being in the band without Nick, because he was a major part of the Kaiser Chiefs early on. I think the thing is jeopardy. Use football as an example, Leeds United are fighting relegation and there’s some jeopardy that makes you play harder. That helps. In the early days you have no money, you want to be successful, early on people might take it away if you get dropped.
“Then in the middle it was when Nick left. We had a record deal and we said to the record company ‘are you up for releasing records without Nick in the band?’ and they were ‘yeah, that’s fine – you just need to make sure you have some good songs’. We just worked hard and made some more songs.”
The Kaiser Chiefs’ Newmarket Nights show also features special guests Scouting for Girls.
Newmarket Nights is an annual series of outdoor concerts featuring some of music’s biggest names after racing has finished at Newmarket Racecourses. This year’s programme also includes Five (June 19); Basement Jaxx (June 26); Madness (July 17); Aitch (July 31); Jessie J (August 7) and Craig David TS5 (August 14).
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