Spare a thought, if you will, for the celebrity who captures the public
imagination by doing one thing particularly well. Rowan Atkinson may be one
of the richest men in comedy but, for the sheer number of passers-by who ask
him to pull one of his “funny rubber faces”, he probably deserves every
penny of it.
One Foot in the Grave may have finished ten years ago, but for Richard
“Victor Meldrew” Wilson, lorry drivers winding down their windows and
exclaiming, “I don’t beli-i-i-e-eve it!” is a daily
nuisance.
In the retro-patterned alcove of his favourite Leeds caff sits another Richard
Wilson — Kaiser Chiefs’ frontman Ricky Wilson, the one famous for being able
to jump very high in the air during his group’s high-energy performances.
He’s beginning to understand what it must be like to be those people.
“People keep asking me to jump,” he says, with a heavy sigh. He relates an
episode from a few days previously, in which a television interviewer
fetched a bin, placed it on its side and asked Wilson to jump over it. “You
would be amazed,” says Wilson, with a mock-weary shrug. “It’s like something
out of Borat .”
Between mouthfuls of his sausage sandwich, Nick Hodgson, the band’s drummer,
leans forward and tells the tale of another television presenter who
jovially inquired who the Ruby of the band’s eponymous current single might
be. “It’s like people going up to Paul McCartney and saying: ‘So, Paul,
who’s this fool, and where’s this hill?’
“This is what we’re up against. This is what Kurt Cobain had to put up with.
And what did he do? He blew his head off.”
It has to be said that the three Kaiser Chiefs gathered here this morning —
Wilson, Hodgson and the affable beanpole bassist Simon Rix — don’t look
terribly suicidal. Mildly exasperated, that’s another matter.
Wilson says he’s been annoyed “ten times” this morning and, just as you think
he might be exaggerating for comic effect, he begins to itemise the ways.
Shortly after waking up, he thought he might cheer himself up by logging on
to the group’s message board and tapping into the excitement ahead of the
release of the group’s second album, Yours Truly, Angry Mob .
Instead, he found several fans expressing disappointment at the sleeve of the
new album — a picture of the group glowering behind a beiger shade of
nausea. The consensus at that moment seemed to be that it wasn’t as exciting
as the image on Employment , the million-selling debut that spawned I
Predict a Riot and Oh My God . It was at that point that Wilson
decided to go online and personally address their complaints — “except I
couldn’t work out how to register on the site”.
Turning on the television, instead, merely made things worse. On Channel
Five’s topical discussion show The Wright Stuff the subject of
declining record sales came under the scrutiny of the journalist and Celebrity
Big Brother evictee Carole Malone, who suggested that it was about time
that millionaire pop stars were cutdown a peg or two. “But who does she
think is going to suffer from these losses?” laughs Wilson. “Not millionaire
pop stars. The record companies will just drop a load more small bands.”
He could go on. And on new songs such as The Angry Mob and My Kind
of Guy he does. It’s a relief to report, however, that it’s only
something you realise if you read the lyrics in the CD insert. Yours
Truly, Angry Mob seems to have located a rich energy source in the
perpetual state of panic in which Middle England likes to live its life.
Wilson waves his hand towards the window, at a Britain said to be
“paralysed” by snow. “Take your train, for instance. You were, what, five
minutes late? Why do people enjoy panicking so much?” (continued on
page 18) Hodgson has a theory. “Perhaps they enjoy it,” he ventures.
“It’s something to get stuck into. My gasman came over today. He told me
about the woman he had been to see on his previous call. She said: ‘Of
course, you know what this snow is, don’t you?’
“He goes: ‘No, I don’t.’ And she says: ‘It’s God’s way of getting rid of bird
flu.’ ” You would think that such subject matter, combined with a year as
exhausting as the one that culminated in the group’s Brits hat-trick in
2006, might have removed some of the bounce from Kaiser Chiefs’ music. It
was, after all, a broadly similar set of circumstances that thrust Radiohead
into the labyrinthine tunnels of doubt and darkness that resulted in albums
such as OK Computer and Kid A .
Kaiser Chiefs, on the other hand, have returned with an album of more pop
songs. “Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the Radiohead way of
doing things,” ponders Wilson. “They probably torture themselves over making
a cup of tea. Which is fine. In life, there are people who torture
themselves over making a cup of tea. And they end up making amazing cups of
tea. But . . .”
He turns to his bandmates for assistance. As befits a true songwriting foil,
Hodgson is swift to oblige. “There are different ways of making cups of tea,
aren’t there? We love the taste of Radiohead’s tea.”
Sensing that this metaphor may be about to expire, Rix points out that there’s
a sensible reason why Yours Truly, Angry Mob doesn’t sound like a
“difficult second album”. It’s actually their third. Having recorded an
album for the ill-fated indie label Mantra back in the days when they were
called Parva, Kaiser Chiefs were lucky enough to make their mistakes while
no one was looking.
Ask Wilson about that period — during which he helped to subsidise the band by
working as an art lecturer — and he cites it as the main reason why the
period following the release of Employment has been relatively
harmonious. Touchingly, Rix wants to make it clear that the ubiquity of I
Predict a Riot and all the hits that followed on from it never
threatened to sap their enthusiasm. “One of the things that annoys me most
is when you go and see Lou Reed, hoping he’ll do something like Walk
on the Wild Side . And when he finally gets around to doing it, he sings
a totally different melody.”The man whose job it is actually to sing the
song nods in agreement: “The song might be the same, but the audience
changes,” Wilson says. “That’s the difference you enjoy.”
If success has the effect of making some bands cripplingly self-analytical, it
seems to have had the opposite effect on Ricky Wilson. The group’s
triumphant performance at Glastonbury in 2005 was the last time he felt sick
with nerves. “Playing to a huge audience is far easier than setting up your
equipment in front of a crowd who don’t have a clue who you are,” he points
out.
Hodgson adds that being in a band means you’re alwayssurrounded by people who
are experiencing the same thing as you. He remembers feeling a little sorry
for Corinne Bailey Rae — a fellow alumnus of the Leeds indie scene — when he
met her on the set of Later . “It was just as her first single came
out, and it was clear that she was going to be huge. I said: ‘Good luck —
you’ll need it.’
“Not in a nasty way, but what we’re doing as a five-piece she has to do all by
herself.”
Wilson has the air of a man who isn’t tortured by the nature of his own
celebrity. Indeed, for the main part, he seems to be enjoying it. In June,
after he was knocked over at a pedestrian crossing, he checked himself into
Accident & Emergency. “It was Friday night, but I didn’t have to wait. I
am pretty famous. I walked straight in. People can say that isn’t keeping it
real, but then, there’s nothing real about a rock star waiting in A&E
on a Friday night.”
Appropriately for the man who sings “And my parents love me” on Everyday
I Love You Less And Less there seems to be no deep-rooted vein of
insecurity driving Wilson. If he could use his celebrity to delegate most of
his workaday chores — “I have to psych myself up for half a day to fill in a
direct debit form” — he would do it at a stroke.
Wilson’s first thought after the car accident was that he might not have been
able to make his hairdressing appointment the following morning. “I really
fancied my hairdresser at the time, and I was single, so I wasn’t going to
miss it for the world.”
Given that he still has the same hairdresser, does he mind being quoted on
that? It might make things awkward in advance of his next haircut. “Not at
all,” he says. “I’m quite an open person. My girlfriend knows I had a crush
on her.”
Is he worried that much of our conversation has been taken up with complaints
of one kind or another? That once some of this stuff is committed to print
and the accompanying smiles are lost, Kaiser Chiefs might seem ungrateful
with their lot?
He refers to a new song, Everything is Average Nowadays , and in
particular the line: “All I need is a ball and a wall/ A sledge and a hill
in heavy weather.”The point, presumably, is that the 29-year-old singer is a
man of simple pleasures. If only the rest of the world — tabloid
scaremongers, the fans who don’t like the record sleeve, Lou Reed — were
too.
Then, as if on cue, his drink arrives. It’s something called a Zinger and he
orders it whenever he comes to this pub. “It’s apple juice, mint and ice,”
he says, taking an appreciative sip. As long as you don’t ask him to jump,
he’s fine.
Yours Truly, Angry Mob is released by B-Unique on Feb 26
